The Horrors / Toy @ Sub Sonic Live, The Garage, London

Given the reputation The Horrors possess as elaborately styled men of fine musical taste, it made sense to get to The Garage early tonight to see the band hand-picked to warm up for them on this bitterly cold December night.

Toy have been long-term touring partners and the venue fills out rapidly once they take to the stage, touting crazed grooves that stretch for miles. The band’s cyclical riffs cascade around the space above the crowd’s heads in a dizzying fashion.

Some impressively manipulated vocals add texture and depth to the band’s cosmic rocking – it will be interesting to see how they bottle the essence of this evil live performance into recorded form, but this set suggests 2012 will be a big year for them.

The evening’s main attraction have never suffered from articulating their aesthetic onto records, from the dastardly garage punk of debut Strange House to the krautrock and Spector-indebted breakthrough Primary Colours’ and their latest opus Skying. Perhaps their most difficult task is to take these disparate styles and stitch together a live show which captures each record’s distinct identity.

Ambling onstage twenty-or so minutes past the 11 o’clock start time, frontman Faris Badwan (nee Rotter) cuts a strangely demure figure tonight, apologising for the late start time and looking as though he may be suffering the effects of a touch of seasonal affliction.

The set is, however, well worth the late start time, with opener ‘Changing the Rain’ offering the perfect bridge between the sounds of the last two albums, stately and serene with an edge of sonic chaos - which the band fully indulge later.

Faris stays perched on a stool for ‘Who Can Say?’ before rising to stalk the microphone for an impressively impassioned performance of ‘/b>’, the crowd responding with feverish excitement. Later, the widely-reported emphasis on Simple Minds-like synths on the new album is best represented by the cinematic sweep and chorus of ‘Still Life’, probably the band’s biggest pop moment to date. Styled like a classic-era member of Kraftwerk, Tom Cowan seems to be receiving all the attention from the recording camera crew tonight, but managed to maintain the air of Germanic cool and precision his haircut warrants.

‘A Sea Within A Sea’ is given the epic outing it deserves and the finale descends into a joyous cacophony with Rhys Webb mangling his guitar lines into a squall of feedback, while Badwan joins in the fun by thrusting the microphone into the speakers. It’s a gleefully malevolent ending which serves to remind me of the exhilarating aural violence of Strange House.

The stabbing organs and Screaming Lord Sutch covers may well be behind them now, but for all their sonic explorations and successes since, it would still have been great to hear more from their early days, hard as that band may be to reconcile with the multi-faceted force that The Horrors stand as today.